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This video image taken from amateur video and broadcast by Bambuser/Homslive shows a series of devastating explosions rocking the central Syrian city of Homs, Syria, Monday, June 11. Live streaming video caught the devastation during one of the heaviest examples of violence since the uprisings began over a year ago.

In a US State Department briefing yesterday, spokeswoman Victoria Nuland described the helicopter development as a "very serious escalation." She also said that UN monitors report that the regime looks to be organizing another massacre in Al Haffa, while bombardments of Deir al-Zour, Deraa, Homs, Hama, and the Damascus suburbs continue. The regime has blocked UN monitors from those areas, making it difficult to confirm who is behind the violence in those towns (previous massacres have been blamed on unofficial pro-government militia), she said.

While Syrian commanders may be able to act with impunity now, given the relatively small number of UN monitors on the ground, Ms. Nuland warned that they should heed the lessons of Bosnia. "The international community can and does learn what units were responsible for crimes against humanity, and you will be held responsible for your actions," she said.

Nuland made clear at yesterday's press briefing that the US has no plan for stopping the massacres, or intervening in Syria, despite its increasingly strident warnings or the threat of mass killing of civilians. That contrasts sharply with Libya, where the threat of massive civilian casualties prompted international intervention.

Nuland defended the US position by saying that foreign military intervention "may actually cause a greater explosion of violence," and that the best course of action was to bring to light the abuses of the Syrian regime. But she faced strong pushback from reporters who cited international regret after the Rwandan genocide in 1994.

QUESTION: I mean, I thought after Rwanda, it was “Never again,” ... I just don’t understand why it is that if you’re – if you know or have evidence that there’s about to be a massacre of potentially thousands of people, no one’s going to do anything to stop it except for ... to tell Assad not to do it.

MS. NULAND: Again, this is why we have the monitors there, so that they can play the role that they are --

QUESTION: See these people be killed?

MS. NULAND: -- designed to play to be able to get in there and stop this kind of thing from happening. But in the context of a regime that is refusing to meet its own commitments, that is refusing to cooperate even on the most basic level with what it has agreed to, we are, at this point, doing what we can to make it clear that this is an absolutely brutal, continued assault on individuals.

…

QUESTION: But you’ve just gotten up and said that there’s going to be a massacre someplace and no one’s going to do anything to stop it except for flail their arms and go running to Assad to tell him not to it when he hasn’t listened or done anything that you’ve told him or asked him to do for the last 15 months.

MS. NULAND: Do you have a specific proposal in mind?

Pressed further about US opposition to intervention, Nuland reiterated concerns about fueling the war in Syria.

"The concern has been that putting foreign military forces into this situation, which is on the verge, as everybody has said, of becoming a civil war, will turn it into a proxy war. … There is a concern, obviously, that you could have some states supporting one side, other states supporting another side. Our goal here is to stop the violence, not to increase the military activity inside Syria. The goal is to stop the violence," she said.